Join aviation and loyalty leaders (and HfP) at World Aviation Festival, Lisbon, next month

If you work in the airline or travel loyalty sectors, World Aviation Festival in Lisbon should be on your radar for next month.

Taking place from 26th to 28th September at FIL (Lisbon Exhibition and Congress Centre), it is the best place this year to hear from senior management at the world’s leading airline groups. Over 5,000 attendees will listen to over 500 speakers.

World Aviation Festival also has a loyalty track to its conference programme. Whilst the organisers don’t make a big deal of it, I have been to the last two events and – if carved out as a separate loyalty event on its own – it would probably be the largest travel loyalty conference in Europe this year.

Head for Points is the Official Loyalty Media Partner for the event and will be around over the three days.

I’m running two articles on World Aviation Festival over the next week. Today I want to look at the C-suite aviation leaders who will be speaking. Next week I’ll take a look at the travel loyalty speakers who will be presenting.

Who is speaking at World Aviation Festival?

The key CEO session is entitled “What is the future of the global aviation industry as we return to profitability, and how will sustainability challenges, digital experiences, macro economics, tech trends and passenger behaviours help shape the outlook for 2024 and beyond?”. It will feature some very well known names:

• Sir Tim Clark, President, Emirates
• Luis Gallego, Chief Executive Officer, International Airlines Group
• Willie Walsh, Director General, IATA
• Guliz Ozturk, Chief Executive Officer, Pegasus Airlines
• Luís Rodrigues, Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Officer, TAP AIR PORTUGAL

The moderator will be Bloomberg’s Guy Johnson.

A different group of airline CEOs will be discussing “The future of cross-airlines partnerships, alliances, sustainability and digital transformation“. It includes:

• Patrick Roux, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, SkyTeam
• Anko Van der Werff, President & Chief Executive Officer, SAS – Scandinavian Airlines
• Maen Razouqi, Chief Executive Officer, Kuwait Airways
• Andre Viljoen, Chief Executive Officer, Fiji Airways
• Jiri Marek, Chief Executive Officer, Air Serbia
• Stefanie Neumann, Chief Executive Officer, Lufthansa Systems

A Chief Commercial Officer panel will look at “Where do you see passenger behaviors landing after the post covid boom?“. It will feature:

• Sophie Dekkers, CCO, easyjet
• Shlomi Zafrany, Chief Commercial Officer, EL AL ISRAEL Airlines
• Onur Dedekoylu, Chief Commercial Officer, Pegasus Airlines
• Aileen McCormack, Chief Commercial Officer, CarTrawler

Of the other sessions, I am particularly interested in:

• a one-to-one interview with Tony Douglas, ex-CEO of Etihad and now CEO of the new Saudi mega-carrier-to-be Riyadh Air, hosted by John Strickland

• a start-up airlines CEO panel, featuring the CEO’s of Norse Atlantic, Lift and Beond

• a low cost carriers CEO panel featuring, amongst others, Eddie Wilson who is CEO of Ryanair DAC

Other airline CEOs due to speak include Antonoaldo Neves (Etihad), Jeffrey Goh (Gulf Air), Robert Carey (President, Wizz Air), Max Kownatzki (SunExpress), Jude Bricker (Sun Country) and Alex Mans (FLYR)

Alongside the conference there is a large exhibition programme with airline suppliers showing off their latest products and technology solutions.

Whilst HfP will be focusing on the Airline Loyalty conference track, there are also dedicated tracks for Air Retail, Aviation IT, Aviation Marketing and Aviation Payments plus a Start-Up Summit, Green Skies sessions and the World Low Cost Airlines Congress

How to attend World Aviation Festival

If you want to join, meet and network with 5,000 other attendees, as Official Loyalty Media Partner HfP readers can get a 25% discount on a World Aviation Festival pass.

The standard price is €2,695 for the full three days – including the summit sessions on the 26th – or €2,295 for a Day 2 and Day 3 conference and exhibition pass. Prices rise by €200 from 1st September.

These are reduced to €2,020 and €1,720 respectively using our POINTS25 code.

Group discounts are available for multiple guests from the same organisation.

You can book your ticket here. The main WAF website is here.

Next week I will look in more detail at the loyalty speakers you will be able to hear. See you in Lisbon!